HealthCare.gov goes down — as Sebelius testifies

Another day of online Obamacare enrollment was lost Wednesday to technical difficulties that forced HealthCare.gov offline — even as Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius testified before a House committee on efforts to patch the malfunctioning site.

Federal health officials said the site, which handles enrollment for 36 states, was taken down Tuesday night after a “partial outage” at Verizon Terremark’s data center. The center experienced a similar outage over the weekend that forced the site offline Sunday.

Sebelius, testifying before the House Energy and Commerce Committee, said the outage was Verizon’s fault and not another glitch for the Obamacare enrollment website.

“It is the Verizon server that failed, not HealthCare.gov,” she said.

Verizon offered its own version of events Tuesday night.

“Since HHS asked us to provide additional compute and storage capacity, our engineers have worked 24/7 to troubleshoot issues with the site,” Verizon spokesman Jeff Nelson said in a statement Tuesday night. “At the request of HHS’s deputy CIO, we are now undertaking infrastructure maintenance, which should be complete overnight. We anticipate the strengthened infrastructure will help eliminate application downtimes.”

Julie Bataille, the communications director for the federal agency charged with constructing the federal enrollment system, said at the daily HHS briefing that the outage took down the enrollment application and the federal data hub, which verifies people’s data when they apply for coverage in both the federal and state exchanges. She added that repairs had helped bring the data hub back online for the 14 states running their own enrollment systems, although it may be running a little slow.

Bataille said once repairs are complete, it will take “a few hours” to bring the system back online. Then, she said, “We will take immediate steps to prevent this from happening again.”